


Deceive Sleep with a Purple Thread

by londonfalling



Series: nights like those you always force me to have [2]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Body Horror, Brother/Brother Incest, Canon Related, Depression, Dreams, Gore, Identity Issues, Incest, M/M, Names, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Self-Hatred, Sexual Content, Sibling Incest, Size Difference, Tentacles, Twincest, Virginity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:29:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26791414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/londonfalling/pseuds/londonfalling
Summary: Thirty days, a series of nights (Urizen / 5D).
Relationships: Dante/Nelo Angelo, Dante/Urizen (Devil May Cry), Dante/V (Devil May Cry), Dante/Vergil (Devil May Cry)
Series: nights like those you always force me to have [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1932046
Comments: 26
Kudos: 29





	1. i. In Your Alternating Voices

**Author's Note:**

> Eventual sad porn (with eventual tentacles, probably).
> 
> Urizen / Dante is the main focus here as far as smut is concerned, but there's some other stuff that has to happen first.

As it happens, he sleeps through an entire month. Funny how real world doesn't become any less nightmarish after.

\--

When the tragedy the era is inevitably due hits, it's, of course, happening on the anniversary of the second occasion he lost everything, give or take a few weeks; it's been _twenty_ -fucking- _five years_ , so the exact dates kind of seem like a minor note in the grand scheme, sorry about that. He doesn't really keep score of the days at any rate – he has people to do it for him, women who are more than ready to kick his ass if he fails to show up to banish possessed cats from apple trees due to thinking it wasn't Thursday yet again or whatever, oops, fuck calendars anyway. This, though, is something his bones are intrinsically aware of, instinctual. A law of nature, an annual wonder, can't be avoided: Dante always gets antsy around this time of year. May. Lots of shit happened in May, the cruelest month of a bad bunch. Little annoyances and life-changing events, every ridiculous trauma melded together into a rake of memories that crawls up and down his spine until he either drinks everything away or first frosts bite the petals that bloomed in spring and the milder seasons are finally done with him for the time being. Come autumn, he's raw and sore all over, yet it gets just a bit easier to breathe until next springtide creeps upon him uninvited, the bastard.

May. What a load of crap.

He was born in May, not alone. It was a mistake.

He had his eighth birthday in May, received his gifts and saw them go up in flames not long after. It was intentional on someone's part; he was deceived. Stupid roses flourish in May, god he hates those things.

He died in May too, even if he wasn't the one to fall. It was many moons ago. It didn't stick. After his resurrection, Dante follows the lead of a biblical example and veils himself in burial shrouds, but unlike how the case was with Lazarus, there's no merry crowd to celebrate the miracle that keeps haunting him, no one to wait for him outside of his tomb when leaves are turning and he exits the cave, groggy with the big sleep. Nobody's interested in burying him either, so he makes himself a living monument instead, reds and blacks of the grieving for the play-pretend widower, his gloves masking his shame for getting out alive with only a scar to bear. It didn't stick, but burning soot clung to his eyes. Hard to see; it took a long time after the destruction of the tower his brother had summoned for the dust clouds to disperse and rain to purge the lands of the remains, longer yet for him to take note of the season changing into summer with its oppressive greenery, the liveliness at odds with his poor mental state. Was a blur back then, all of it.

Sadly, life around him gets more high definition after the first jubilee of the event, fall of man and demon, which means he has to work at making each succeeding May go away as quickly and painlessly as possible. Every year, deep down he expects something will give like it once did, and once everything does at long last go off the rails in primavera, he's at a loss, virtually unprepared despite his broad experience. Wishes and fears both have a way of coming true. Fuck.

In short, Dante knew better than to accept this mission. As always, he goes when he's called regardless.

Things go south. There's a powerful demon. There's an army of other demons. There are flesh-eating, concrete-crushing, blood-drinking tendrils wiggling about and a throne that's not empty. People die, maybe even some he knows personally. Shit and fans, what can you say.

Just like in the good old days, Dante's beaten into submission before his opponent even breaks sweat, lacking the decency to take him seriously; if there were a storm and a hefty dose of vertigo as well, the déjà vu alone might knock him out. It's May and he knew what was coming the moment he saw his newest and perhaps last-ever client smile, can't deny it. Even so, the vastness of strength the enemy is packing in its fingers, which it barely has to lift to promptly dispose of him, jesus, still manages to surprise. That and the roots, which both forge it an armor over its bark and shoot out to strangle the opposition, and the number of eyes or whatever the numerous blinking lights on the trunks of the creature are supposed to represent, all in the wrong color he's already come to resent in plants and V's eyes.

This shit again. Hello. Sorry. Goodbye, or as he's said it once already, _I have to stop you, even if that means killing you_. He hits the ground screaming.

Getting ahead of things a little. Rewind?

Qliphoth, that's where the plot rolled into motion. Yeah. For the most part, today's afterimage of Temen-ni-gru stays true to the original instrument of eternal misery. Well, at least as far as the looks are concerned: it's not like Dante's read up on this rot to find out how these gosh darned obelisks are supposed to function, apart from them being giant middle fingers or unnecessary penis extensions, maybe. Common sense doesn't go together with the concept either, should he have any, so he'll claim somebody's compensating. Anywho, digressing: Qliphoth, Qliphoth. The great pillar that threatens mankind and the domain of daemons alike in this round happens to be a huge shriveled plant, which both puts a new spin on a classic and is fitting as far as etymologies are concerned, sure, but a spire is a spire and he'll climb it up or down, whichever way he's got to.

The city lies in ruins around ground zero. Déjà vu. They march on past the debris without letting it slow them down. Push back the overtly eager tentacles, hear a child cry in the distance, step over a drained-out husk or a hundred, gaze fixed at the goal. The uppermost branches of the evil magical shrub sway lightly in the wind as if to broadcast how collateral damage has reached similar sky-high levels. Literal Hell has broken loose well before their party even sets foot into the devil's lair, it's self-evident; who knows how many will be killed when it inevitably blows up or does something equally exciting. Not much they could do about it, not much he gives a damn about enough to focus on for more than a lazy second. The townies have their work cut out for them, doesn't involve him. They'll rebuild if there's anyone left to act when it's all said and done, simple as that. What are human costs to a subhuman, anyway.

Is what he expected. It's a big job, he was told. _Big job, Dante_ , and he could already tell things were about to go to sideways in short order since he, and he quotes, was "gonna need the help". 'S what Morrison said, anyway. The list of foes he can't curb on his own includes only a few items, not that dragging the women into the battlefield with him would help any if his hunch was correct. Couldn't have been anyone else.

Still, it's hilarious how he's getting what he wants, sort of, yet his mind's been doing its best to deny the truth. Initially, letting his mouth run off and going through the motions as if a bomb hadn't just been dropped on his desk, he was more bothered by pronunciation issues than the implications the operation he was offered had in store. Big job, _Dante_. On Morrison's tongue, his name keeps sounding a touch foreign: attention on the vocals, a longish E, annoying. Not a fresh observation, it's been mangled a million time more often than treated properly. Nobody's saying it right and hasn't in decades to a point where he's unsure what he'd do if someone dusted the old relic of correct articulation off and unleashed it at him unawares. In certain circles of the shady criminal underworld, those in the know, "Dante" is warning or at least a bad omen, something to be spoken in hushed whispers. Apparently, his demon-wrangling alter ego has reached a nigh mythical status among fellow dubious types. The boogeyman − say it thrice and he will appear to bag you and drink up your entire alcohol supply, better watch out. He's flattered, truly. Trish, for her part, goes through several different phonations ranging from shaky, scared syllables to too confident a D that rolls off her tongue with the speed of a bullet, sometimes shaping the word breathily and inhaling in the middle so that the consonants fade out. Hard to blame her when the woman she was modeled after didn't quite get the hang of it either. Eva's Dante was too soft; _Dante, dear_. Birdsong. Sounds like someone else entirely.

Even Lady does it wrong, and she's had more practice than most. At the earlier stages of their acquaintance, distant curiosity had colored her tone underneath the open hostility − "Dante" let him know she was interested despite her best judgement. Hearing her utter her version was the moment that had truly cemented it for him; his pretension wouldn't become reality, his flirting was a front indeed, they would never become a couple even if their partnership makes them an item in some definition of the term, hah. The cautiousness shifted into disbelief as the clock marched on and informed him his fame had preceded him: you're Dante, the legendary hunter? You, with your fraying undershirts and frayed mind? He gets that a lot. Nowadays it's snappy, _Dante!_ where all letters are curt, whiplash, Lady barking out her orders and grievances. Last time Dante hears her call for him, she is shouting it as a synonym for _help_ , and the sound reverberates between his temples with the weight of guilt. He had guessed and regardless did what he was asked, led outsiders to danger knowing full well what they'd be exposed to. Decades spent doing business in his company and being in their company and yet he's acting as if his fuckups affect just his own self. No, Trish and Lady are paying the price, more bodies in the ground surrounding him, and he's…

Dante makes landfall headfirst. Ha, into pieces like poor shattered Rebellion he goes. _Something Yamato never did even when she could've_ is the last thought that flashes through his skull more or less intact. _For some reason, ruthless as he was with her, he didn't want to damage the sword. He didn't and then Yamato herself was rendered useless._ Blinding pain and blood on his retinas, and the film blacks out into blessedly quiet static void that can't last. Yeah, where was he anyway, where was any of this going? He's, he blinks, a grainy filter between him and his surroundings, sharp edges like bone shrapnel, though it melts into something smoother and less jagged as his heart beats. Heart, so Dante has a pulse, thus the first thing to register is he's not dead. Goddamnit. Thus the first thing he has to deal with is the resulting disappointment.

Not dead. Alive against all odds. There was − In the heart of the tree, he ran into sheer power he was totally defenseless against, unlike anything he's ever witnessed (Not true. On top of the cursed high-rise, it pinned him down and laughed at his helplessness, a pretty face and a prettier voice). His life has been a series of letdowns, really, he has a neat timeline. On the line segment he spreads out inside his head now − which is… where? −, Mundus was the first. Point zero times two. Mundus let him down once, twice, and has refused to finish what he started ever since, resulting in thirty-six and twenty-five years of Dante trekking from ashes to ashes. Then Argosax, the giant spider he's faced so regularly it's practically become family, missing that guy, also the whatshisname oil baron in Vie de Marli, Mundus, screwed up the chronology somewhere there but never mind, the tepid green-black slime blob equipped with laser beams. He's forgetting some but he doesn't care. Point is, all lemons. The mark of Cain on his forehead works as intended and prevents him from getting zapped, so makes sense the newest contender couldn't do it either, for all that it addressed him like a dear ghost.

A prettier voice. What the creature donning a crown of thorns once was had, it was. The voice. A slightly stilted way of speaking, now magnified even further because there is nothing human about the false king who borrows the familiar patterns. It isn't entirely what it was. Was weird, yet it dictated his focus like nothing else with a single-word prayer. _Dante_ , in worship and command. What it said was _You have my attention, and now, I have yours_. He.

V. V−

God, the dull noises in his ears, makes him go crazy. A silent contrabass pouring onto his drums. Shut up. Shut down. He comes to again only to switch off. Maybe weeks go by or seconds.

The dream swirls around him in sickening pulses. Throbbing on his temples, is it that or something else, how can physical damage carry over to the other side. Muscle spasms. Sleeping is a mental hangover with tangible side effects. Dante's asleep. Dante's asleep because he got hurt bad, got to give his body some time to heal itself. Right yeah sure, no use crying about bygones when there are brand-new developments to whine about. Where the fuck is he? The thoughts churning in his stomach leave him alone long enough for him to try and orientate himself; he puts the inevitable realization off for the moment, lets is sink and bob up again later.

Current locus. Huh. Seems that Dante is lying on the ground in a tangle of limbs, though there's nothing under the back he's most likely reclining on, his clothes and battered skin growing a measurable distance between him and the surface. Oh, no devil trigger no more, great. Unanchored in the absence of a crux, he's afloat on the waves of the nightmare that crash over him every now and then, and he wakes up in another dream that's the same than the one before it, adrift. Difficult to make out the view when it fluctuates so. Might've closed his eyes, sees through his eyelids. Hallucinations 'n junk. Wow. Must've hit his noggin pretty hard on the way down.

Down?

Down means there's an up. Where? Why's he here, he, was cast out from a place. It had a floor − stone, blood, vines, a spiderweb of death-hardened tissue. Kept slipping on it, lousy balance. Projectiles knocked him down. He fought. He's chocking so maybe he's throwing up. Mushy brains nestled in a concussioned skull. Damaged goods. Explains things. Ground meet head, percussion. Drowsy; is he certain it is good to sleep with head trauma? He was − A circle, an arena, walls built out of big twigs. The chair's missing here. No chair? He inhales his confusion and it goes down the wrong pipe several times, he figures it might still be the same place. This bubble he's returning to, drowning in. Red and black too, but the endless landscape spreading itself open in front of him has no borders, stretches on and on to each direction. Maybe not downwards, there's a flooring to stop the eye. Red and black and above a foggy white sky. How curious that he hasn't ended up in backyard of the mansion, the orchard, the field of roses they used to play in as kids to Eva's great chagrin, he wonders as his vision submerges. Man, odd to be here. Hurts but not that much. 

Dante is and isn't without a body. Right now, there's a part of him that's as real as he ever is, which isn't a lot, but the rest are somewhat immaterial; he feels his toes curl but can't make his arms comply, kind of sensing every cell in his frame and also none of them. Partial sensation is plucking the strings of his nerve fibers at random: this bruise aches, this one doesn't. Thinking is tough. It isn't necessarily bad. All in all, sleeping could be a pleasant enough existence if he could silence the stream of his consciousness permanently and if were alone the entire time.

At first he is alone. No one around but him, aye; silence tightens around his scalp like a band fastened with a screw until he realizes it's actually the headache he's feeling, and when his ears pop, more soundlessness floods in, hissing. If a spruce tumbles and there's nobody there to hear it, is anything of value lost? At some point, when his throat is less clogged and he can pinpoint its location in space, he's screaming or his mouth is, for no reason but mainly because there's nothing for him to destroy but himself and even that is pointless, it's never not pointless because he heals and the torture will pass. This place, the dreams, it's not Hell, it's not limbo. Limbo is a state of mind, Dante takes it with him wherever he goes. Lost the count: how many times has it been now? That he comes back and doesn't.

Urizen.

His brother is −

His brother was −

The expectation, the expectation was that it would not occur again, not anymore. By some stroke of luck and an incredible amount of misfortune Dante survived the corpse resurfacing in the shape of the katana in the lovely town of Fortuna, touched her made her sing fought with her dishonored her and said his goodbyes to her in the end, spent every waking moment with the weapon for a full year afterwards even when she was a million miles away by then, or that's what it felt like, the distance. She kept whispering to him inside his head, through the telephone lines when the boy gave him a ring, and only time and deliberate avoidance could break the bond formed between them. Kid stopped calling him, Yamato faded out eventually. That should've been the end of it. While it was nice to have the reminders behind lock and key, what the tactic working meant was that its owner really was pushing up daisies (and roses, to torment him); as long as he breathed, a synonym for him wanting something, he wouldn't have let any part of him give up like that. Did end up giving up his life, though.

That was the end. Credits rolled into view, final fanfares wore off. Finis. Life goes on; Dante's well into his forties now, having held out twice as long as his older sibling. A mindfuck, but his mind has been fucked and he has been fucked in his mind so frequently that it doesn't feel like much to think about. He's getting there slowly, back to thinking − the lobes of his brain appear to be separate from one another, but they're connecting. A pity, but it is what it is. Idle thoughts while the fumbling's going on: this new brand of his, rugged looks, aging, letting himself go by foregoing shaving and gaining in bulk, not investing a fortune in a wardrobe after each personal failure, has helped him to compartmentalize. Back in Argosax's region, watching the demon shape shift from male to female struck a chord deep within him. See, the devil flickered between forms and yet remained the same thing. Dante, too, can look different and be nothing but what he's always been. Why bother with upkeep when he's lost the boyish features he used to have in common with his twin, making it impossible to preserve a sliver of him on his own face? Bygones − the man inside his mirror today has no counterpart, he's old, he's an orphan and an only child, a proper adult.

Used to be that way. He believed in finalities, then another fucking May was upon him with its bony fingers.

In May, Dante floats inside his subconsciousness, gradually more and more anxious. With increased clarity comes terror, crisp panic sparking on every square inch of membrane in his body. It's the same dread that rappelled his chest from beneath his sternum a long time ago. Imagine that, a quarter century. He recognizes the feeling from the ancient tower, when it began to dawn on him there was no way out for the both of them alive, the harrowing knowledge that his brother couldn't be reasoned with and their fates were inevitable since not a single aspect of him could ever be altered; he was a constant that couldn't survive adaptation, a hothouse flower Dante couldn't keep alive in snowfall but whose obstinate, overpowering scent clung to him decades after its death. When glass has been cast, it will retain its form in pressure and reach its breaking point quietly to shatter unbending − Dante was as unable to change him as he was to change his own mind. Temen-ni-gru filled his stomach with tar-slow fear, and it's familiar in him now even if it's faster, ricocheting between organs that are little by little awakening.

Urizen. V. V and a longer name. Shitfuck. V−−

These are the facts. Dante's spine is made of gold. His twin's birthright, his amulet, yes, but it's the most malleable of metals and it's met every external impact and survived in one piece no matter how many knots Dante's tied himself into, no matter how little it resembles its original configuration. He was beaten, crushed, flung out, had his vertebrae reassembled by a bad landing, he endures. One half of him is alive, the other dead. So be it, so it's been for decades.

Fact: he can overcome his hysteria by going with the flow. Breathe. Take some time to think about what he doesn't want to dwell on and what he's not allowed to forget. Fit fragmenting hemlines together. Face up to the truth. Remember. Retrieve gravity.

_Why do you refuse to gain power?_

_Here your powers are weak, human._

**_This is power._ **

Might control's everything, doesn't it. Christ.

Okay, let's try again. His situation. His brother − was. Urizen, on the other hand, _is_ , very much in the present. These are connected. But. It's still never him, he's been gone since he fell. Sometimes, there's residue, the dust lingers even when everything else has burned down. Clothes and hair get stained, smoke breathes its bitter perfume on your skin. Fire remains, leftovers from a once-bright core. His hunger remains in some form, somehow; Mundus extracted it out of his dying body to craft himself a dog of war, then Dante drove it out by driving a sword into it but apparently didn't finish it, and now it's here again, packaged it a different shiny shell which gives off false promises and horrors. Whatever Urizen is, it is, or he is, less than a skeleton, stripped from everything that made his sibling resemble an actual person. Alright.

Urizen, Urizen, Urizen. What's in a name? Your reason. Of all the languages his raison spoke to him, Dante understands violence the best, yet he can't quite let the dead ones go. ὁρίζειν; to divide, limit, separate, lay down, mark. ὁρίζων, horizon, is that which limits, divides, marks. The scarring on his palm is his reason is his limitation is his mark.

Urizen is the past catching up to him, come to think of it. A neat bow on top, the wreath of roots. Dante, as always, failed at laying it to rest or at least putting an end to himself. Kind of obvious at this point. He's seen and followed it before. The light he uses as his guide is pitch black and darker than the night around it, but isn't that what happens when stars collapse? Black holes. What his brother was is heavier than the darkness surrounding him.

See, –

One gray afternoon, Trish showed him a book whose pages had been dotted with Rorschach test blots. "Showing "is a generous term for having the thing shoved in his lap; he's a courteous guy. Holding back any and all dry remarks he could've had on her sudden interest in armchair psychology, Dante did what he does best, did what he was told and tried to come up with replies, but the ink twirled into white as meaningfully as booze trickles down the neck of a bottle when his hand slips. Nothing. He couldn't say that. The narrow sofa felt too wide, as if he couldn't sense her knuckles and the tome resting on his frozen knee, so he lied, laughed with an inflexible throat, made a racy joke. Trish's unhappy frown let him know he had flunked before her words reached his ears. Wonder what she had thought she'd gain from the experiment and more broadly, him. Take another look, she said and walked him through every picture. Her explanations knitted the terrible, arbitrary emptiness of the blotches into roadkill and mutilated butterflies, bloody spinal columns and disturbing sex acts, what Dante was supposed to see. The funny thing about it: afterwards, those images replaced the entropy, it became impossible to make out mere smudges. He couldn't wipe out her instructions and unravel the threads to render them insignificant again. Unsee.

Dante sees it now. Ah. Perhaps it's been there the whole time to guard him, merely takes a while for him to notice. Maybe it just arrived. It offers few answers but its presence doesn't waver an inch, no matter how violently the dream reverberates and drowns him in blurring emotions. The dreamscape flips into a correct position at once when he spots the horns, seeks the veins on an impulse, the grim expression iron takes when it's cooled. The entity that drags his focus towards itself does not have the same gravitational pull his twin did, not even when its movements are less fluid due to the dense plating slowing it down like it's wading through a basin of lead. Not the same, but the being paying a visit to his fantasies has become a routine for him, something to expect, something he can handle, a point of reference. Instead of a thousand little currents tearing him into a thousand different directions, Dante gets just one, and it's strong enough to pull him to the shore; there is comfort to be found in the fact even hunters will be hunted. He will use the straw he's given, he will.

The Angelo. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The Angelo stands fast by his side steadfast as always, uncaring about how wildly the scenery spins around them. It seems indifferent towards the fact it's not casting a shadow even though it's towering above him too − there are lights, lights everywhere, bright hues, divergent colors twisting into vortexes, but they don't fall on anything either. Maybe it's just that his optical nerves are fried. Doesn't matter. He's saved.

With a simple movement of its wrist, his angel cuts him down. The broadsword goes up and descents, cool as you please, effortlessly unceremonious as if it isn't a ritual they've gone through during a thousand and one nights, and then Dante is weightless for a moment. Every ache disappears so quickly he can't detect which side of his hull accepts the blade, the edge taken off at last. Their destinies in reverse; everyone and everything else leaves him, but not this.

Ah. Dante blinks, Dante bleeds and dies. Of all the songs in the world, this one might be the most familiar.

(It is, it's pure mathematics. Mundus' knight has been visiting his slumber on the regular for decade and a half. Considering that the time Dante spent with his brother in flesh and blood was eight years and a couple of weeks, and then merely a handful of hours in the cold post-fire period, it is his twin who's a stranger to him, not the monster his imagination has condensed into.)

It's kind of sad that this is the way for him to find himself again. At least the familiarity softens the harsh greens of the armor until they are as gentle as the blood filling his mouth, gonna be okay – if it speaks his name behind its solid mask, the sound gets lost on a mute tongue. So nice to have someone waiting for you to wake up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've no idea how to tag this. What else is new.
> 
> The title of the story, among other things, is adapted from Propertius 1,3, one of my eternal favourites due to its gorgeous, gorgeous Latin. "purpureo fallebam stamine somnum", as it goes in the original ("I deceived / tricked / staved off / escaped").
> 
> (A disclaimer, btw: I don't consider anything that doesn't happen in the games themselves canon, so if there's some DMC 5 lore I'm missing due to not having seen any mangas / interviews / whatnot, well, I wouldn't know.)


	2. ii. Seasons in Reverse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OT: Have only managed to play the prologue of the Vergil DLC (the new theme song is still a mystery to me too since I can't not pick Ultraviolet when given the option), but Dante being his rank announcer – and so very enthusiastic at that – is already killing me. Mr. Dante, honey, your enormous crush is not only showing but can be seen from orbit.
> 
> On topic, then. Today in "Dante's saving himself for marriage but damn if his nightmares aren't risqué": Nelo/D and D having a pretty rough time. New year, same old bollocks, sorry about the spam.

_What would you do if you had a second chance?_

To her credit, Trish doesn't actually ask him that. In general, doesn't pose questions that matter or demand meaningful replies from a blatantly dry well. Dante likes that about her. He sees her thinking about it often enough, her brows scrunching up in a way reserved for this particular kind of rubbish, alright, but she either fights the words to the bottom of her throat or lets herself be distracted by the drivel he spews out in preventive defense – as if it's mere happenstance that the whatever robs attention away from the sentence taking shape on her palate. _D'you think I could light the gas stove with Ifrit without blowing anything up?_ and voilà, they have to run a test. To her credit, any lousy diversion works because she's for one reason or another allowing him the evasion. Maybe it's Lady's relentless pragmaticism at play; she can't stand bullshit, knows when to fold and quickly realized the stray Dante had collected on a whim could be a sound investment, so who knows, could be her influence he's seeing in his favorite fake demon. Cut your losses and call the lost cause by its name, that's a Lady sentiment if any.

Alternatively, maybe Trish herself has matured enough to be able to sway away from awkward social interactions. Wouldn't surprise him, she'd been more functional than him at her worst. Like sure, they were objectively a sorry fucking pair in the bowels of the haunted castle, both incapable of generating natural dialog or convincing emotions even at gunpoint, courtesy of Mundus. No objections there whatsoever. Dark souls, all lights out: he's relatively sure Lady still winces when thinking back on the months that followed, not the ones immediately after the events but those he sort of has some recollections of, when he was relearning how to operate his body in vertical dimensions and Trish was keen to point out every little detail she thought she had an in-depth understanding of. The sky being blue, water being wet, Morrison being an avid smoker and suspiciously charitable for a shrewd businessman, Lady having a short fuse, Dante's exercises in drowning inside a tumbler being futile. The difference is, at some point, somehow, contrary to all odds, she got better. As long as Dante puts on a successful act, keeps yapping and wearing his happy-go-lucky clown makeup, he passes for a person too, but he also gets more inhuman spring after spring as his sense of self erodes away underneath the façade. Besides, Trish was technically under mind control in the past, extenuating circumstances to be fair. Dante's just wired this way.

Almost like a person in most things, he could state if he were feeling generous about himself. The exception are the answers: he won't dish those out and for whatever reason, Trish won't ask. _Why is he like this. Why does he never refer to the sibling he was born with. Why isn't she invited to tell him the gossip she, a former Mundus Corp employee, has to have on the knight he slaughtered. What would he do, given a second chance_. Spares them the trouble of acting like she's never said a thing, or, worse still, the quarrel they might get into due to her insisting and him refusing, flat-out ignoring her, escaping. The time she took up Freud with him was already bad enough, thanks. Silence is golden.

One of the aspects of the nightmare he's been shoved into is that it makes him think about it anyway, unpleasant recognition trickling closer to his nerve center and leaving treacle-sticky residue all over his consciousness, dribs and drabs that eventually form a stream. Sad how he still doesn't know what to reply even if the person asking the questions were him, lone Dante in a mirror. _What would I do._

The problem is, he's never been reliable. Not when he asks. Not when he replies.

In the seam between two realms, Dante's looking up in the space above him as he bleeds out from the jugular the sword has torn open into a clinically precise fatal wound. There are fragments of seconds between this dream and the next: time is gushing out of his corpse just like the blood, but it's slightly more coagulated than the plasma, lingers in his veins and refuses to let him go. It's a losing battle regardless, he determines, the conclusion merely gets drawn out a tad. Hm. One second, the weapon hits the point below his Adam's apple and sinks into him; pain arrives half a sec later, severed screaming nerve endings kicking up a storm of blistering sand inside his neck. Four seconds, he's dead. In between, he looks up and wonders what he's seeing.

The sky. Hah. The sky is blue, they say to children, just as the sun is yellow. Dante, age five, tremendous fan of stargazing, put his mind to it and realized logic would dictate Hell's got to have something else as its heavenly vault, not the same fabric he'd try to find constellations on. If the underworld is located under the world, then the devil must have his own clouds. _The sky is fair, and it will always be above everyone's head, no different._ Said that once himself he did, used to have the confidence to make such bold statements. Yet to this day, what a joke, to this day he can't begin to understand what he meant with it. The years have managed to dissolve some of the details. He recalls the explosions, the turbulence, Mom's face distorted into an expression so naïve it ruined the illusion and made Trish look every inch the foreigner and skinwalker she was, how terrifying it had felt like to be free from the chain around his neck, earlier. His own thoughts and feelings during the would-be kamikaze flight, though – did he have those? Can't quite tell. The celluloid is damaged. Dante in the plane, a fresh kill weighing him down as the vehicle soared higher towards aether and what he thought was the final after he could base his personal chronology on. His hands were a vice around the steering wheel, white knuckles, empty heavy stainless hands that would lead him to safety when the only thing they wanted to do was to apply the same pressure to his hyoid, be done. Couldn't do it to her, take her with him. Didn't. Blood in his eye, curdled into pearls on his lashes – the horizon was crimson then, too. The sky above him then, and now. In Hell, he looks up and only sees red before the instrument of execution descends a second time and relieves him from his head again.

Truth be told, the sky has never been blue. The sky? He can't remember it being. He's never witnessed it awake, never left his dreams or the room where his reflection came to life and provided him with answers he hadn't been looking for, has been sleepwalking in four different decades. Maybe this is all there is. Realizing it could finally set him free.

Dante dies eyes wide open. Then he wakes and the visitor's still there, ready. He dies again. The first few times the Angelo butchers him pass in a haze, the boundaries of lives cut short smearing into each other as his vital fluid runs out towards its gauntlets. Iron seeks its north, this is his. Scrapped and recycled long before he entered the halls and stairs of Mallet, his actual magnetic pair is defunct, yes: the entity which remains in his stead is an echo of an echo of an echo or a shadow squared, and it's fine, Dante's happy to have that. When you get down to it, he is a memory of something that used to be that's been forced to stick around against his will as well. Birds of a feather flay together. In a more serious vein, the recent nightmares have been disorientating him due to their unfamiliarity. Godawful stuff, novelty – can't tread the well-trodden trail, doesn't know which way would take him to the surface and which leads further into the depths, his picture book only has circles repeating themselves over and over and over. Now that there's a known factor thrown in the mix he can flock with, the chaos begins to order itself. A blade pierces his atrium and he dies a clearer death.

This happens repeatedly. Their danse macabre progresses in neat chained loops; his visitor slays him with swift blows, slays him until he's solid enough to be picked up on its arms to get strangled or stabbed there, slays him while he's wobbling on his knees, keeps at it until he's able to stand fast on his own. Dante's so, so grateful because it's much easier to find his feet again when they're kicked out from under him, 'course it is. What has motivated him to do anything ever if not having his ass handed to him by happy family reunions? Slowly, the dreary architecture of his mind starts to establish structures for him to build his present tense on. Facts.

1\. He's in pain.

2\. He keeps dying and coming back.

3\. The Angelo is with him. The Angelo is what makes him die.

4\. This isn't real due to facts number 2 and 3, because his own demise doesn't stop the pain and because the Angelo is no more, he's made sure of that himself. Oh. Nightmares again.

5\. Down is where he falls once struck and where all the fluids go when they exit him. Conversely, up is where he tries to fit the stars. There are none. This isn't real and he has only himself to blame.

Okay.

Eventually, having his flesh slashed into ribbons really starts to sting. So he has bad brains, what of it, though luck. Wallowing in his filth ain't gonna fix jack. _Come on, get up. You can do better than that_. The first strike he registers from the beginning to end he gets a little surprised by, estimates it'll puncture his stomach and senses it meet his carotid artery instead, oops, but after that, he can tell what's coming sort of accurately. Should do something to avoid the attacks, then, seems like the sensible thing to do. In a minute. His shoulder, belly, entrails, huh, he's guillotined with a claw, now it chokes him to death with its gloves, he finds his broadsword again, soon parries, delivers counterpunches, loses his balance and a leg, sooner or later manages to hold his ground, massacres the fiend the same way he did in reality, let's see, sixteen years ago. Rebellion sinks through the plating on its abdomen, and it's fine because he knows he's destroyed the amulet halves, they never feature in his daydreams. Not a rerun, not real, just a reminder.

For once, his situation is given to him in doses small enough for him to deal with; death by death, he gets a little less overwhelmed. When he finally greets the Angelo standing from the get-go, wakes up into yet another dream sequence in full awareness, sword in hand and prepared to do his worst, it's hard to say how many times they've conked out at one another's hands on this stage alone. His opponent is already there, holding its piece in front of it and resting its hands on top, patient; in the background, the landscape seems to have stagnated for good. Ground painted black by a net of grisly roots, occasionally flashing red with the liquefied human matter coursing through it. Observing the terrain under his heels confirms the dream hypothesis further. Dante never has a shadow inside the mirages, neither in the bedroom he bombed into smithereens on his way out nor, uh, wherever this is supposed to be. Above, there's more mist than sky, but what little of it is visible seems to be a medley dark scarlet shades, swirls and waves of it billowing not unlike an earthly aurora borealis.

Rings a bell or hundred, simply put. All the scene lacks is the throne, and borders, and Urizen. Still not quite how he pictured the underworld. You know, the demesne of devils with its accompaniments, torrential rains and hailstones, hordes of lost souls, fire and sulfur and familiar features shrieking their eternal torment. But he has the Angelo, prefers it this way. Little fellow over there is more user-friendly than the man behind its inspiration or the latest cheap knockoff with even more green on it than V, so if it's to be his guide through purgatory, so be it. Neither of them moves as Dante takes stock of their surroundings with brand new eyes, yet some sort of common acknowledgement is hanging in the air. _Here we are, you and me again. Thanks_. It's possible he's merely projecting. What does it matter. Ultimately, the Angelo's company is unique in not demanding him anything, so he's going to enjoy this new normal until the new new normal will take its place with its novel atrocities.

His date looks very angelo-y. Shocker. Still got the great big antlers, pointy joints, epaulettes you could land a helicopter on, swanky purple cape he's bled and blown a load on under similar circumstances. It comes close to being comforting; red is better than emerald, familiar pains beat the unknown. The replica of the monster he's slaughtered doesn't necessarily want anything in his phantasies, neither to kill him nor to fuck him, but it's highly aware of its duties and carries them out lock, stock and barrel, lovely in its predictability. Not that it has to compel him, not that playing along constitutes a remedy for his recollections. In his reveries and illusions, whatever this trance is if there's a difference in the first place, Dante's in control as much as he's ever in control. He could vote against the initiative laid on the table. It doesn't happen.

His pulse thrums in expectation. Everything about the scene is seemingly identical to the one preceding it, but the rule goes each twenty winks erase the previous vision. Dante's learned his lesson the hard way: sometimes, usually, dissimilarity run deeper than skin. He's has this type of dreams too, oh so many times.

"C'mon, dance with me," he says to the Angelo, shrugging off his aggressive stance in favor of a more vulnerable, enticing slouch. Dissolve Rebellion, tug the neckline down, waste impeccable bedroom eyes on a statue. Zero reaction. How convenient he has zero pride.

"Kill me," he tries, but his sweet talk crashes into a wall. It's exhausting to have to DIY everything about your own torture, swear to god. His feet carry him and his cross to Golgotha in a straight line, adding a perky sway to his otherwise stable gait, flying the flag of _fake it till you make it_ Qliphoth-high. His march proceeds uninterrupted; the Angelo watches, not hateful, not seduced, not entertained, removed, frigid, impenetrable in the face of Dante's affectated flippancy. Déjà vu.

_Unfortunately, our souls are at odds._ Shut up, he snarls at the invading flashback, stay down.

During the earlier phases of the experience, the Angelo trashed him to his knees to end a head trip or a hundred; now, Dante bows for it willingly. He kneels before the hallucination as if he were ordered by thin steel and a steely voice, as he would've if this had transpired at the summit of Temen-ni-gru. It'd be windy, drizzly rainstorms lashing their hair into similar disarray. His twin, the fringe on his brow uniting them already before any penetration, would consider it yet another struggle for power, something he'd have to coax out of Dante by force, and Dante, dishonest, would let him believe what he wanted. Because he's a liar and a thief, he'd like to make a show out of resisting something his soul would be pleading him to beg for. Ostensibly, he'd hate the hand pulling his hair. Hate the jeers, having his mouth fucked, licking him pristine and untouchable after the deed. Capitulate voluntarily in secret. He goes down to serve the replica pretending the voice is real. _Kneel before me_. It never asks him to.

Monitoring him from above, the Angelo holds position. No protests, no help, no signs of excitement as Dante deals with it the codpiece he's dismantled frequently enough for the process to have been immortalized in muscle memory. It stays lukewarm, disciplined and entirely non-judgmental even when it's got to be aware of his arousal, which is betrayed obscenely early on in the game by the crotch of his pants having tented up under its own authority. Dante inspects himself with some disgust; such a depraved picture, him so hot and wanton and willing to fall on all fours at the slightest fanciful connection he can establish to his past. On the flip side, he'd likely be especially sexed up if he did get the derision he feels owed for it, so at least the muteness comes in handy, keeps up some appearances of respectability.

With bated breath, he watches his wrist bring the Angelo to full hardness as a matter of practiced routine. It doesn't fail to make him shiver in anticipation in any case, he's kidding nobody here. If he squints, he can almost see the veins encompassing its girth warp into bluish tones; his palm pulls back pale skin, not black stiff inorganic material streaked with the occasional purple and green. Underneath the foreskin, he imagines, flesh feels both firm and soft to the touch, responsive, the tip an excited pink he can't wait to devour. A hitch in carefully steady breathing as he thumbs the glans: Dante steals the imaginary sound, tries to make his mind produce more but fails. The automaton's tongue, should it have one, must be as inflexible and rigid as its rubber-dense shaft. It's providing him with neither the encouraging phrases he's never heard falling from his brother's lips nor the words he's been gifted with, _I was so eager to see you_ , which he keeps replaying repeat after repeat during their abysmal foreplay _._ Misplaced fondness aching behind his breastplate, Dante aims the erection towards his mouth, presses a shy kiss on the head before he enveloping it with his lips and lets his desire loose.

There are few things he's ever hated as bitterly as this monster, yet he's loved it more than he's ever loved himself. Affectionateness, as uncalled for as it is, keeps mulling inside his rib cage so potently it makes his lewd motions feel chaste. Almost giddy from the scarcity of oxygen, Dante takes it in wholly, withdraws to the crown, blushing from an emotion he can't name until he notices his cheeks have become watery. Oh. It's messed up and thus expected that he's crying for the husk when he's been unable to do it for his twin for such a long time. Could be a physical reaction to stimulus, the unnaturally thick appendage working his gag reflex, though he doesn't think so. He's most likely crying because he can, because this personified notch on his bedpost isn't the person he mourns and because it doesn't care that he's doing it. A stony thumb moves to sit on his malar bone, maybe to wipe the tears away in gentle comfort, maybe to poke out an eye. Wish it'd palm his skull to demonstrate its ability to crush him without even trying. He blinks the droplets out while maintaining his speed. Walls are closing in, everything's askew, the Angelo wears him out stem to stern. When it comes inside him, the metallic tang is salt and honey and frost on his tongue. The dream cracks.

First times are always the hardest. As much as he detests platitudes, some things do get easier with repetition, even loss; or, if not easier, their initial impact leaves you so raw that any additional tragedies merely graze the old scars instead of wounding your bark anew. Dante, durans, adapts. From this point on, it's him who finishes them. Doing the dream equivalent of plugging his ears and starting to hum, he caters to his untreated oral fixation to his heart's content so as not to dwell on anything: if his focus wanders, he'll notice details being off in ways he hasn't discovered before. Like the brute lacking the perineal raphe he'd expect to find on a man. There's no seam in the middle, only black chitin extending from underneath the bulb of the penis towards its backside, such a curious tiny tidbit to note that he's getting hanged on it, wonders if the convulsing feels nice on its cock. Best to occupy himself with the blowjobs. Subsequently, sometimes he suffocates on his enthusiasm too early and ruins their climax. Mouths the dick too eagerly, imagining it's the Angelo pushing itself into his throat and not his muscles straining against the swelling tissue to swallow it down in full, to the base, now now now, that its stationary hips are following his movements in earnest hunger. Is there anything he doesn't flop at by default?

Occasionally, it occurs to him he could try and bite the thing off just to show himself he can. Kicks, shits and giggles. On second thought, his tongue brushing the underside of the organ, lingering on the slit on the top and pretending he can taste himself on the pre-ejaculate, lips gliding back and forth on the thickset body without finding the dorsal vein they're looking for; on second thought, the flesh is so stocky and heavy he'd only lose his teeth trying. What did that mean when it happens in dreamland again, Mister Freud? Communication issues and regretting what's been or will be said, obviously, it is about the maw indeed, but Trish's amateur ravings about psychoanalysis would slap him in the face with crap about his self-image too. A tooth falling out? Let him bet. Insecurity, fear of growing old, unwillingness to make choices, aggression, powerlessness, castration, death of a loved one, sexual repression, wanting to be nurtured. Rebirth; he wishes. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and his desire to cause himself harm has the depth of a puddle.

Toothache symbolizes masturbation as well, her lessons pipe up. Make of that what you will. Accordingly, every now and then he helps himself with a clunky, sweaty fist to take the edge off. Embarrassingly often, he doesn't need to touch himself: either the reckless abandon he applies to the task of giving head to the Angelo knocks him out or the process itself is enough to do him in, resulting in him hitting his peak handsfree. Sort of makes him question what's going on with his physical being: just how wet are these dreams, exactly? No idea where he's lying, crumpled into a pathetic reeking heap with his skull shattered in a thousand little pebbles and grey matter splattered all over the place, though the location must be remote since no one's found and euthanized him.

Of course, the Angelo's nighttime visits have made sure Dante's no stranger to coming inside his pants while dozing anyway. Their current activities aren't poles apart from the contents of his regular nightmares, and it's not like his days back at the office had clear borders between them either. Life is a sludge, slumber consists of amorphous, indefinite episodes – everything flows faster than he can handle but nothing ever changes. Destiny has a messed-up principle in store for him, guaranteeing that different things are the same and similar things keep mutating until the originals have fizzled out of sight. Prime example: the sons of Sparda, when it was a concept equipped with a pulse and two pairs of lungs, donned their identical features in contrasting fashions and their personalities which clashed were essentially uniform. Greed cost the firstborn a fatal price, greed has brought Dante to his knees. He's an old hat at this, basically.

He does speak to it once before pacifying himself with its length. _Why do you keep coming back to me?_ Maybe the lack of an answer is related to the fact it's the other way around, Dante the huntsman and the Angelo the game. The creature comes to him because he seeks it out, and the creature comes because Dante, palms, holes, avarice, makes it.

\--

In due course, his wits pull themselves together firmly enough for him to grasp that this month of Sundays serves a purpose other than agonizing him. The bits and pieces come back to him slowly: he got defeated, had his skeleton pulverized, ended up in a coma to facilitate the recovery. Killing time, now. Dante's body is a stubborn piece of shit that will manage to heal even after every single bone in it has been ground to dust, a goddamn cockroach, and there's nothing else he can do about it than wait, he's not dying even if he wanted to be. Thank you, Father, for the genes.

As hard as it is to acknowledge that Mundus must've found it amusing to make an angel out of a demon and as much as Dante can't claim to share his sense of humor, he can't deny the Angelo's status as a guardian spirit. Without it, the chance to meet it again, who knows, mayhaps there'd be no coma and he would've succumbed to his injuries a long time ago. He's kept afloat, protected from himself.

_I dreamt a dream, what can it mean?_

_And that I was a maiden queen,_

_guarded by an Angel mild;_

_witless woe, was ne'er beguil'd!_

So it is written. Arm your fears and wait until something gives.

\--

Suppose he could refuse to play along, it's his slumber he's trapped in after all. No one's forcing him to destroy angels, suck face with his personal demon or suck its dick; he probably could just wilt and go as boneless as his corporeal mess somewhere there on the other side, let time flow him by without participating in anything but rounds of mental solitaire. Ain't no reason why the restoration wouldn't carry on in the background even if he sat on his ass and did his best to ignore the glowing elephant and its horns. Yeah. Theoretically, he has the power to call it quits, but no one's surprised when he won't. He doesn't want to. What he lacks is self-control and whatever it is that's the opposite of masochism, a healthy sense of self-preservation perhaps, and this'll egg him on as long as there's something he can spend himself on.

He'd kind of hate it if he let the illusions go to waste, too. Jesus fucking christ.

\--

He can't remember how many times they've done what they've been doing. Too much of a good bad thing is starting to crack him up; he's drunk with the stolen intimacy, feeling uneasy about the excess while yearning for fortunes beyond his means. (Hunting the wicked isn't his only vocation by far. In addition, he's a full-time glutton. Gambler, narc, addict, dragon chaser, forever pursuing a bigger high, more. Speech. Rude lips, soft under a tongue. Japanese curvature carving him back up into role of one half of a whole. Blue.) See, the problem with comfort is Dante can't handle it for long without doing something to drive it away, certain that it will be a short stint of happiness-like conditions even if he were not to interfere. Better to tear off the bandage while a brief sting is the worst that could happen.

It's not quite what he's doing though, minimizing pain. One whatever-time-of-day-it-is, Dante finds himself desperately one-sidedly making out with the thing, pressed against its armor from collar to toe and clutching its temples to keep himself upright. The headpiece prevents him from having access to its mouth, so it's more about him spreading his saliva around the crudely casted ledges which imitate a pair of lips, trying to warm them up and make them melt against him by the power of his own temperature, than any proper heavy petting, but this is a man who has never received his first adult kiss and can hardly compare it to anything. The perihelion is right here, the closest he can get to the sun. nil novi sub sole, yeah yeah.

Out of the blue, an unexpected movement startles him. The gauntlet goes for his ear rather than try and arrest him; the tips of it follow the path a muscle cords on his neck in a sluggish but light touch, reach for the depression above his heart and find it vacant. No amulet, he smiles at the beast. Consequently, he has no value to it anymore. Drained, barren well. Be as it may, he has to concentrate on not leaning against the talon by reminding himself it's not exactly cradling his face on purpose, it's too stiff and still and impersonal for tactile displays of affection. Merely – touching him.

What? Why? Is it going to kiss him back, sweep him off his feet to carry him in its arms like a hard-won bride, find them a safe nest where it can make love to him like they're capable of romance or cohabitation?

"Stop it," Dante says. "This feels wrong," he continues when the other hand joins the one caressing him already, from the shell of his ear to his clavicles too. The Angelo is not like this. His brother wasn't, would not be. Not them, not now, not ever, the fantasizing only goes so far, merely a single gesture if he really, really needs it. If it, this, they, it were real, it would not humor Dante; it was him who formed its basis, and he'd be unable to hate himself intensely enough to be able to lower himself to this level. 

The absence of pain is worse than its reverse like always, causes his shape to lose cohesion. Dante's too old to learn new tricks. Crucify him or dismiss his total existence with a single incision, he'll lick your boots in gratitude. Tenderness, however, he can't adjust himself to. He wraps his hand around the wrist as far as it can go, unable to reach around the entire width. Isn't that a familiar song? Limited reach, arms that are too short and weak to catch the falling, fallen. He looks the Angelo in what passes for an eye on the helmet, trying to communicate or understand.

"Kill me," he croaks. Funny how much it sounds like _fuck me_. Tone low and dark. The _please_ in his groin, grinding against the artificial bulge in the plating. The two aren't synonyms semantically, in a practical respect the jury's out: the nightmares, for all the suffering, have been keeping him alive all these years because they're predictable and they allow him to put on a mask outside them, having confronted his naked psyche in some manner. He needs it to rearrange him in a layout he recognizes again. Why examine which sentence he means when it'll read him correctly no matter what?

Another new dawn, another new low in his degeneracy. When the Angelo begins to stir, clasping its sword and raising it towards the firmament, Dante grasps its forearm and follows the movement until it climbs so high above him that he runs out of inches. The weapon being made of similar stuff than its wielder and the light source being so vague and all over the place in this domain, there's no flash of metal, just the cool-fire glow of corruption painting his cheeks blue.

Limited reach. Arms too short and powerless.

The sword penetrates his gorge, the lower parts above his collar bones; he arches into it and lets the intruder pass through him smoothly, his frame barely thick enough to contain and conceal the blade, lodged inside him vertically and drawing a grey outline beneath the hide that his bile flushes momentarily clean from longing; the tip comes out somewhere around the small of his back accompanied by a spurt of gore, keeps descending until it meets the ground. Shaking like a leaf, gasping, groaning filthy vocals, Dante tries to go lax so that the Angelo will have an easier time manipulating his flesh into a more suitable formation. Nearly slips down on the flat since he's teetering on his toes, which aren't strong enough to hold his weight on them alone. Falls a span, a disgusting squelch as his stomach is flooded with various bits of viscera, how disturbing to be so aware of your intestines, until the meat of his waist gets tied up by the gauntlets' vicelike grip. Now there's no moving, Dante thinks and throws his head back as far as it can go, not very far, only a couple of degrees, stress sweat beading on violin strings, the tendons of his neck.

His lover, his torturer supports his lower body and keeps him securely in place for its loins. It's more about controlling the unintentional jerks and twitches than him struggling or trying to get closer consciously – the impalement has paralyzed his spine from the upper vertebrae to the coccyx. Wouldn't be running if his legs weren't useless anyway, though he'd love to offer it every last bit of his flexibility, eagerness to buck against it. His hand should not work either, but with severe effort, he manages to operate it anyway, fumble towards the Angelo until his knuckles bump against the imitation of a penis his previous fondling has left erect. It feels damp, condensed moisture gathering in the grooves of the corona, but pinned as he is, not capable of tilting his head down, he can't make sure why, which liquid. For the current purposes, the phallus is more than slick enough: he's taken it stone dry before, taken Rebellion from the pommel to the part where the guard splits into spikes, taken his guns one at a time and simultaneously, the Alastor with copious amounts of lubrication and lightning, the whole nine yards of his artillery and a fair share of less conventional weaponry. Dreaming. No lasting marks, no harm done. Not that it wouldn't be too big for him in any event: they aren't really compatible, him and his prince, but he'll erase as much of himself as he has to in order to make them fit anyway. Winded from the exertion, he guides the tip to his entrance and lets the familiar tide carry them. Forever dutiful against his skin, the Angelo brings its hips forward and enters him unceremoniously. Poor little doll; it's not faring any better with Dante than wrapped around Mundus' finger. Different shackles, the same lack of agency. He's been questioned, _why do you refuse to gain power_ , but brother, he's never refused this.

Ah. Ah. The first few strokes drag endlessly, slowed down by his untrained tightness even when the pace has never, not once changed on the gargoyle's pelvis. As always, it's doing his bidding and him with the obedience of a machine, nothing less and nothing more. Brutal, still. Hurts. Keys him up. Finally a rhythm he is used to. Preparation or not, the friction ensures his internal muscles will warm up to it eventually; maybe it's even faster like this when the agony's there to turn him on, heaven only knows, he's never counted, loses time in the sensations, just like that, nn. The thrusts are perfectly controlled, and step by step, Dante relearns how to work with the cock, how to loosen his walls when it presses inside him to the hilt and how to contract around the shaft once it's there, as it begins to pull back so that it can push deep deep deep into him again. Stretched wide on its arousal, his beat undulating more rapidly than light travels between them, he rather senses than hears bone scraping against the metal, no matter how loud the sound must be due to all the quivering he's doing. The funny wet squeaking noises on the sidelines are probably him, too. Ungreased connectors creaking as they're mounted one inside another. If only could he get a groan out of his toy.

In the seam between two states of existence, sleep and awakeness, living and dying, Dante throbs and blooms around the twin blades as a red flower suspended into a memory. It's an unfaithful replica of the day when his trigger was gouged out of him like a rotten tooth, isn't it? He'd been hoisted by his literal petard then and so he is now, even when none of the things inserted in him belong to him. It's still his desire that he's undone by, his fantasies, his need to be worthy of momentary attention. He's never been able to speak his mind about anything important or to unfold into honesty, so being forced to open up amounts to something, is of value. His lies unfurl as the Angelo fucks him open, petals colored vibrant by the flush on his face and chest. Sees himself. Dante tends to it as if there were a flame inside them both, either, faintly visible through his chest like the profile of the greatsword. Play pretend that the angel is not impersonally cool in spite of the heat it's rocking into. Laughter bubbles up; shitty symbolism is as constant a companion as the creature that's tucked itself in his ass.

All sensation has migrated to his skin, the inner linings the erection keeps prodding against. Two modes of existing Dante's caught in the middle of: to be numb, to be oversensitive. He feels the Angelo moving inside his stomach, his rind pulled taut over to show how it splits him neatly in two; this is the one time he's not alone, inside his own body or his mind, the latter being wiped away by the urge to grit his teeth so that he won't chew off his tongue. Feels better than any of the things that only feel good.

It's raining. It's always been raining since they parted ways after the briefest of reunions, eighteen years old, the sons of Sparda breathing in plural for a while again. Brother, he was gorgeous as he let Yamato say his goodbyes, and a twisted segment of Dante finds his remains brilliant now, is in love.

It's not rain, not even salt water. Dry sclerae ache under his lids; it's punctured organs and blood from cheek he's worried without realizing it, epitome of the tears he couldn't cry for him in the real world, when they could have been any use. Show him – what he was doing to Dante. What Dante couldn't say to him. His love and his grief (his love is his grief and his grief is his love, intertwined). The final farewell he never got the chance to deliver. _I forgive you but cannot forgive myself for wanting to forget._

Far too quickly, the stimulus brings him to a boiling point. While unable to lift a fin to thrust into, get any pressure on his dick, the girthy appendix rubbing against him from the inside will milk him dry in no time, no matter if he merely starfishes, trembles uncontrollably, wants to come so badly. He's on the cusp already when he senses an undertone in the surrounding seas and gets distracted. There's an impression of a distant presence, as if their copulating were watched from afar.

This is his dream, right? No one else has ever seen this side of him, hence no one else could dream of it. Stragglers? He's not seeing shit with his eyes cinched shut like this, but he can tell it's not the peanut gallery of lesser fiends he might expect to find in the outskirts of the inferno; any major daemon he'd detect even while having his brains literally fucked out of him. In substantive terms, there's no one here but Dante. Can't place it.

What would it amount to, even? If it were him, some exotic remnant languishing on the mortal coil, the reaction would be so predictable it wouldn't smart for long. Plain as a day: he would recoil in contempt at the sight of little brother prostituting himself for the lowest bidder among his various incarnations. Would he consider it a revenger for the numerous trespasses he's made against his Abel, a Sparda heir taking advantage of Mundus' freaky mannequin to degrade their lineage? Is it, does Dante?

The though slips away as smoothly as the counterfeit penis slides into him – not very, but his fingers are too slack to hold onto the notion. Wishful thinking, at any rate. Of course Dante wishes he could spread his self-indulgence open and have it seen by him. It'd mean he wasn't gone.

He is gone. The punishment Dante's received doesn't fit the crime when he's getting off on it. Off he gets; the orgasm bursts inside crest of his pelvic bone so violently that he's blacking out before getting to luxuriate in any of the trapping related to the post-mating satisfaction, such as having the Angelo fill him with its cold release or sensing how the suction of it leaving his body hollows him out. Matters not – he has thousand and one nights to spare.

Dante kills the dream but not its cause.

\--

He is reborn intact, now and always. Untouched, unloved.

\--

Dante awakens into a new flight of fancy. _Do you come here often?_ he asks aloud, not actually amused, then gets down to business before he can get disappointed about not receiving an exasperated verbal riposte for his trouble. Things roll on under their own gravity, their rendezvous leaning more towards the erotic now. On the whole, the angel isn't too bad. As a sibling, it's far more considerate than most he's had. No competitive streak, excellent skills in battle, relatively approachable, a decent lay. Regardless of the position they're in, the proportions of its cock don't give him permission to try and pass his sexual partner off as anyone else, but if he manages to lure the Angelo on top of him when he's five-legged on his hands and knees, he's allowed to conjure up pleased expression on actual facial features while getting it from behind, nice and hard and impossibly deep. 'S nice.

He's ungrateful, though. Isn't used to having his fantasies lined up in queues like this, it's fried his dopamine receptors in lieu of sating them. Abundance is a strange bedfellow for someone whose lot is to pine; very much on brand, losing his mind when given everything he's ever asked for. Wants more and gets too much. After dozens (hundreds? no way to tell) rehearsals, even the fun parts start to chafe, except they don't, literally, the abrasions never last till the next proverbial daybreak. As it happens, unconscious Dante unfortunately is even more conscious of how damn much he misses the ability to scar and belong.

Now, there's a performance going on. Apparently, he's… struck the Angelo down. Its legs are folded under its body, as if it's decided to sit neatly on its knees, and Dante, Dante seems to be straddling its lap, fingertips tracing the valley between its neck and shoulder in quest of something dearly needed.

"Kill me," he begs its passive countenance. He's not entirely sure what he's doing but he can't stop, tries to dig into the creases of the armor. He tastes mallet and the rictus looks slippery and shiny, must've been kissing the golem again. Where does the mask end? It hasn't taken the helmet off once during all these decades and neither has he, and this instant he's afflicted by the feverish urge to displace it. He has to see --

Kill me.

Kill me.

Kill me.

Do not let me kill you. Him, us. Myself.

When the helmet proves too tough to remove, Dante attempts to pull off the breastplate in its stead. It's difficult because he can't find the sutures, there are no sutures, his nails corrode short and bloody. Seamless armor, the carapace is a body. Just like him, the Angelo is all shell. Unmoving now. Doesn't defend itself or him. He keeps whispering, praying, as he reaches for his piece. Rebellion is too bulky and clumsy in his hands for this and the plating is too sturdy, so it takes some trying, and trying, the blade slips, and trying, to make it splinter. As it sinks into the pauldron and slices a chunk of it off, Dante feels an answering agony blow up in his own bicep.

Does it burn?

Does it hurt?

Can it, did he ever feel even tiny portion of terror he made Dante walk through alone?

"Why can't I kill you dead?" he asks. Speaking to many and no one. _I have no name, I am but two days old_ ; the name died with him, lucifer the lightbringer, and maybe that's why there's no gravestone, there'd be nothing to put on it.

From there, first blood, it's easier going. The rifts spread, crack crack crack, with a small push, there, which makes the weapon unnecessary, time to jettison it. Unarmed, he sets out to pry the pieces away with his bare fingers, which is admittedly a tad challenging when he disposes them of one of their upper limbs, crimson and black spraying his field of sight cheerfully vivid. Turns out that the parts he rips off get translated into mirrored injuries on him, his pelt possibly covered in a similar web of breakages as well. The plate is wrenched out – his sternum gets some fresh air, ventilated ribs. Dante fractures the beak-like protuberance in front of him – his own nose drops, thump, weightless, on his groin, which may or may not be into this, he doesn't have a clue. Flesh falls off his body in corresponding places, tiny chips and lumps the size of his liver, and it makes sense because it, the creature, has grown into what it is today inside Dante's heart. Inside the Angelo, there's nothing but him anymore. Should be the other way around, his identity meeting its death when the Angelo pours itself into his empty body, but the corruption is too far gone. He killed it. It never was with him in the dark. Here.

Panting and pained, his surviving arm mostly stripped from flesh, he steps away from the coat of mail he's mangled and goes to grab the devil arm he threw aside moments ago. The ruined visage taunts him in the middle of the other damage by being so calm, unyielding, detached. Complete uncaring apathy. The blood loss quakes his steps towards it. The helmet won't come off. This is an insurmountable statement. He'll improvise. It's been welded to the neck, which in turn is welded to the torso, which Dante's cut up into a gory fucking mess.

The head comes off. He's weeping ugly burning tears as he beheads the knight. It's so easy here to cry. Dante honors nothing but his own misery and cowardness with it, not artificial demon, not the brother he lost, sodality between siblings, not their mother, father, universal mercy. It's selfish bloody waste at every level, yet he's not even getting turned on by it, probably. The thud of the head hitting the ground is heavy in a metallic way, lacks the squish something stuffed with flesh might have. A bleak noise. Solid brass. It's still a quiet affair since it doesn't say a thing to him the entire time. Meek. Weak. Someone's howling. When he turns away from his own eyelids, thick black ichor is spurting out from the severed neck. Owing to the slight delay in the retaliation effect, he gets to witness how it stains Rebellion's teeth before his own cranium gets chopped off.

The axe will always fall and they will always lose. They'll be here, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. He's not getting better, only more self-aware.

\--

Sometimes it goes like this: Dante wakes up with his eyes closed and his orientation on the arena lost, but the Angelo registers to senses other than sight without fail. On other occasions, he's instantly astir and about, confronting his guest as though the previous and ongoing scenes weren't separate entities. They'll have sex, fight to the death, blur the line between the two. Somewhere in the distance, his tissue is knitting itself together.

Today-tonight, it goes like this: Dante wakes up with his eyes closed and his location uncertain, but the space around him echoes like a void. If his mind is a sonar, the pulses it emits propagate on and on and on uninterrupted by the standard hard-metal armourstone. No blips and ping on the radar. Except – Dante gets an inkling, drops the ball as he scrambles on his belly to regain control of his limbs in the panic, this isn't how it works, isn't alone.

Something has shifted. Moments pass and he's up, looks around a vista that's unaltered and thus unremarkable, spots a character watching him a couple of steps away. Green-black kneepads, unnerving height, reddish lights for orbs, yet it's not the Angelo, what's missing? It stands stock-still for the duration of an eternity, then lifts its greaves and slowly, slowly takes them to its nape, begins to lift off the helmet.

The head comes off again.

No. There are rules, not acceptable, his companion never talks, never has a face –

The figure underneath the helm does and does not wear the same face Mundus had chosen to preserve. Unhealthy pallor, contrasting dusky welts under the eyes. Long cloying lashes. Cold-hued veins breaking the even gossamer of the skin. Yes. But. The nose is a prominent crooked landmark, but it's less proud in shape, as if it's been broken once and, though having healed without a trace, has retained some of the defeat. Brows not protruding enough. Pointier chin. Lips too overstated, wide on a jaw that's too narrow. Two gaunt cavities in place of cheeks.

On the whole, the configuration has plenty of the heraldic characteristics associated with the family coat of arms. Looking closer and focusing on the individual components, the composition falls apart and loses its likeness to Father – the blazon is a failure, the message interrupted, the reader cannot reconstruct the correct image. Colors transmute, the tincture loses its traditional palettes of argent and azure. A pair of vert irises under sable hair. Staring.

"Oh, great. What you do want now?" Dante addresses the apparition. Attack is the best defense with manipulation embodied. Kill before you get killed.

He doesn't answer, just keeps looking at Dante with that fucking almost-an-expression that regardless manages to be a far cry from the non-expressions Sparda's firstborn used to cloak himself in. Like the wraith is sad for him, pitying even, as if he has any room to do so. Dante repeats the question, feels Rebellion's grip materialize inside his fist. Primal as it is, his fight-or-flight response triggers and stabilizes his being; this is not a foe, not quite, but neither is he a friend. With him, silence is fool's gold. Beware.

V, naturally, is carrying his cane too. What separates the realm they're now in from the one where they met is the fact he doesn't seem to be reliant on the accessory anymore. It switches hands swimmingly, left to right to left without an ounce of weight put on the handle, before its owner plants in in front of him, rests his spindly spidery claws on top merely as an idle gesture and speaks. Frailty is a front; for all the digits seem like they could collapse under their own weight, laid on top of each other like that and having the fortitude of icicles or spun glass, there's a tungsten core running through every cell. Brazen directness will cut more incurably than any knife.

V, not leaning on his silvery stick, speaks: "What I want does not matter. You of all people should know we can rarely get away with our wishes to begin with. I am here for the truth."

Dante, increasingly nervous and hoping there were a silver bullet in his pocket, wastes some energy on an incredulous laugh. "Bullshit. You chased me down, used my goddamn fence as your middleman and cornered me in my camp only because you wanted something. Treat me like an idiot if you must, pal, but don't expect me to play along."

"Nothing," V says dispassionately, "has ever been about me. Not in the world of the living and certainly not here of all places. This is your dream; you have known it from the start."

Let it not be said that Dante can't multitask: while what's being said takes precedence, it's kind of hard not to brood over the how. Predictably, the distortion in the voice remains even without a headpiece to warp it by more natural means. The corruption is so obvious because V's right, it's not about him, because V's pitch is not the one Dante anticipates he'll hear when he speaks or spoke for the first time, having slithered his way under the front lights of _DMC_. Strangely, it's both higher and not low enough, and the absence of nasal consonants makes his bitterness shine through bright as neon. Make no mistake: while he pronounces his words more softly, he's is absolutely merciless too. Lady has her indifference towards his private affairs, Trish her acquired human decency, his late twin his utter lack of fucks to give about Dante; here, though, is someone who could refuse to skirt around the common oaths of secrecy and noncommunication with his hounding. Golly.

"I know jack shit about this mess," Dante says. Wrong. His guesses are educated. "I don't even know you," he continues. Wrong. He does. He lies. "I just want to get this over with." Wrong. He doesn't. The aftermath is, has got to be, worse than his current dire straits. "What the fuck is it that you want from me?" The wrong question, too.

"You are inside your own head and I can see you fidget there. Do not lie to me," V declares. At least he has perfected the skill of sounding rapt and freakishly attentive without being interested in anything around him.

"Isn't that what you've done the entire time, lied and tried to deceive me? Rich."

" _I_ have no name. In order to be misled, you would have to believe the lie."

Well, there you have it, he made the token effort to go down with a meaningless last stand – can they move on now, get to the point? Dante's tired. Dante's bones are tired. It'll probably cost him a great deal to be so honest about his exhaustion, but running into the bird of ill omen will already have come with a price tag. "What are you here for, V?" he sighs.

"The truth. Yours."

The smirk lands on Dante sharper than a shiv in the spleen. Hah, it's him alright. You can't carve a mouth like that on a marginally remodeled skull, prop it in on a skeletal pike and proceed with the assumption it sets up a successful snare. Worst disguise ever, Dante thinks, almost feeling his side getting soaked in icy imaginary blood seeping from the point of impact.

_What would you do if you had a second chance?_

"Tell me," V smiles, beautiful and so very ugly, "Who am I to you?"


End file.
